1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the general fields of microfluidics, cell based assays, and/or high-throughput assays.
2) Description of Related Art Including Information Disclosed Under 37 CFR 1.97 and 1.98
Biochemical and cell-based assays are widely used for basic biological and clinical research, as well as commercial applications such as drug screening, diagnostics etc. Typically, biochemical assays and cell-based assays are performed in multi-well plates, but this approach has several drawbacks. Multi-well plates at the throughput levels of 6-well, 24-well, 48-well, 96-well and 394-well require large numbers of cells per well and high volumes of expensive biochemicals. This prevents the performance of cell-based assays using precious cell types such as primary cells e.g. from patient biopsies, stems cells etc., and also increases the cost of cell-based assays. On the other end, multiwell plates at the 1536-well and 3456-well throughput require expensive liquid handling machines to operate them, and suffer from issues such as fluid evaporation, that create challenges to use them for cell-based assays.
Microfluidics involves fluid flow inside chips fabricated with features at the micrometer scale, and thus offers the ability to manipulate fluid flow at very small volumes. However, there is a lack of microfluidic grid-based devices that allow for the performance of high-throughput biochemical and cell-based assays in a miniaturized manner, are compatible with existing fluid handling and imaging technologies that are typically used for multiwell plates, that allow multiple modes of fluidic operation, and have essentially similar flow rates through different reaction units within the device.